The Waiting is Over

July 28, 2024 / aggiemurch

Written and read for you by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side

With an emergency run on 4 x 4 gauze squares and medical tape as ears are covered in solidarity of one nicked by a bullet, this might be the week to invest some petty cash in Johnson & Johnson. You never know when the secret service will not be paying as much attention as they should be. Surely another head will fall in the line of duty, though last week’s bullet served a gift onto the locks of the dyed orange one, who now combs his hair into a cunning curl around the wound while one wonders why the bandage remained on for so long. Is there a hole, a missing chunk from the ear lobe? Will this require time out for plastic surgery, or is he too old for that? Age now being an issue placed on another foot.

For the waiting is over. The long weekend that began on Thursday when the American President, Joe Biden, reportedly tested positive for Covid and retreated to his Delaware home where, in close isolation, he prepared his letter to the American people. Published on Sunday, the 21st of July at 1.46pm, saying he would not seek reelection to be the next President of the United States. Age, infirmity and honesty have called him, and he listened. It is no easy thing, accepting who you have become with all that you have done, and want to continue to do, and put aside the dreams of what you still wish you could be. Leaders from around the Western world have, in their own styles, tipped their hats to Joe, breathing a sigh of relief that he has made this monumental decision while nervous about the unfolding of the oncoming political months in America. As of this writing, Kamala Harris has earned enough support from the Democratic delegates to be on the ticket as their democratic nominee in August.

Politicans who could be considered either Presidential nominees or running mates are all endorsing her – saying in one way or another – “I’m right behind you Kamala.” Well, strong women are familiar with that phrase.

But how will it play out in greater America? Is America really ready to put all of its prejudices aside? Kamala Harris is: a woman, a caramel-colored woman of mixed race with a Jewish husband, a lawyer, and from California. Now there will be endless discussions – but maybe it is a time to think, know what we know, what we do not know and, as some say, understand the difference.

At the same time came the Windows computer melt-down that also began on Thursday. The BBC news chose only to tell us of the doctor and hospital appointments that were cancelled, pharmacies struggling with prescription refills, and of travel disrupted, flights and trains cancelled, and long queues at airports around the world. Many, like Schiphol in Amsterdam, who cancelled over 200 of their flights on Friday – even little Jane Does at home or our community library – all were effected due to the Windows outage. This was all brought together for us with the weather forecaster smiling and chatting along with no tell-tale screen behind her. We were lost as to where the winds, the rain or sunshine were coming from and going to. I asked our daughter Beatrice – who follows such things – to explain, as simply as she could, what happened on Thursday night. She says, “usually this sort of software is teased out, 5% here, 10% there and so on, checking for those glitches and things that go bump in the night – or on your computer. However the company, Crowd Strike, decided to send out the updated software to all Windows computers across the world at once. They have been juggling knives the whole time and dropped one – this time slicing a toe off. Business company IT staff are still working, getting computers one at a time up and running. Though the weekend is over and world politics, wars and sport return to take precedence, people are still trying to get to their doctor or back home, and through this week the effects are still being repaired.

Thursday also began a long weekend of the British Open Golf Championship played out at the Royal Troon course in Scotland. The rain and the wind raced in from the sea and onto the course beating down the roar of old champions as they tried to rise only to be shut down by younger, faster and tougher players. Tiger Woods drove out at Royal Troon this weekend, beaten by the course, his age and health and it could be hard for him not to say, ‘maybe there will be another time’. We watched holding our breath as Justin Rose, my home-town boy, ‘almost’ won the championship to raise the famed Claret Jug. Will he, can he win one more time?

TROON, SCOTLAND – JULY 21: Justin Rose of England tips his hat to fans in the grandstand as he celebrates a closing birdie putt on the 18th hole green during the final round of The 152nd Open Championship at Royal Troon on July 21, 2024 in Troon, Scotland. (Photo by Keyur Khamar/PGA TOUR via Getty Images)

The truth can be brutal. Novak Djokovic spoke his own just over an hour after his defeat at the Wimbledon Championships, “I was inferior on the court. Carlos was the better player from the beginning till the end. He played every single shot better than I did. Last year I lost an epic five-set match where we went toe to toe. This year it was nothing like that – it was all about him. He was the dominant force on the court and deserved to win”. Gareth Southgate has also resigned from his role as manager of The English Football Association. In his eight years as manager he raised this squad up to be so very close to the best. He too is stepping aside to let another man take the helm.

There was a pause in all this to-ing and fro-ing and on Saturday I find the Farmers’ Market as busy as ever. The school year has ended, but with plans and travels disrupted, many families have not left the city. My first stop is always the French olive bar where barrels of olives, beans, garlics and vine-stuffed leaves tell me there is no need to cook dinner tonight. A small dish of this and that with a baguette from the French bread stall and a glass of wine will be just perfect. Then I visit with Ron who has been sick for the last few months and lost so much weight that his teeth are getting loose. But he has help to set out his honey on the table and a stool to sit on. I know that to pay him by card is the easiest for him, but maybe because the nurse in me is curious I hand him a 20 pound note to see how he manages. He has to think about it and find the £10 note and the £ 3 in coin. He comes up with £ 2 and I stop at that. We talk awhile, he so softly I have to lean in to catch the words fluttering through his teeth, but we manage, seller and customer, continuing our connection, passing a few friendly minutes together. Ron, with the support of his family and the other market vendors may manage the summer months sitting on his stool and selling his honey. But there will come a day when like the Joes, Tigers, Novaks of our lives it will be time for him to close up his stall and watch the people go by.

This has been A Letter From A. Broad. written and Read for you by Muriel Murch
As always, overseen by beatrice@ murchstudio.com

Sunshine and Storms

October 19, 2023 / aggiemurch / 1 Comment

Written and Read for you by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side.

This Letter was written last weekend just as the storms were breaking in Israel, Gaza and Palestine. Since then events are unfolding at a fearful pace and I have not gone back to update this blog. There are better places to find out what is happening as we try to keep all people in our hearts. This program is always first aired on KWMR.org on ‘The Lowdown show’. KWMR.ORG is in the middle of its fall Pledge drive. If you feel you can support the little station that could and can and does make a difference, we are all grateful – especially in these difficult times. Thank you. https://kwmr.org

On this bright Saturday October morning, The Primrose Hill Farmer’s Market is bustling. The stalls are overflowing and there seem to be more shoppers, children and dogs than I have seen all year long. Like squirrels, we are stocking up for the winter ahead. I buy olive oil and artichoke hearts from the Olive Bar, then see Ron, who now walks with a cane, with his Horizon collection of honey and I choose a jar of freshly harvested heather honey. From Pete, of Brambletyne Farm, I gather eggs, small windfall apples, some of the last Negro Kale and fresh mushrooms. Spelt bread from Olivers and the French baker who always gives me a sweet grin and his ‘best’ loaf. Alex of Five-Way Fruit is doing a brisk trade with perfect pears and the last of his berries grown in plastic greenhouses. Here is lovely Angelina, who comes at harvest time with their family wine and olive oil from Italy. Onto the back of the market and Varley and Crouch for Parmesan and a slice of three-month-old sheep cheese plus 100 grams of Parma ham for tonight’s supper, with Matthew’s Eden Farm Organics baked potatoes. Mathew also has the last of the fresh carrots – they are getting large, but with their tops on, are still fresh. I remember to buy unpasteurized milk and butter from Steve Hooks’ farm stall. But no meat today, either from Hooks or Picks or even one of Rafik’s chickens. I pass by fresh pasta, smoked salmon, empanadas, fresh broth and tempting macaroons. On my way out I take a loop through Ted’s Veg and there is the prize of the morning. Bert, of Ted’s Veg, has a basket of fresh walnuts. They are still moist, and the shells green with damp mould. They lie cool in my hand as if they have been plucked from a woodland floor. I scoop two handfuls into a bag and hope that Bert will have more next week. Only when I get home do I realize I have forgotten onions and garlic. The day is full: a noon-time haircut followed by a Film Festival screening. When finally we come home, I am exhausted. Flat out on the sofa, rehydrated with Russet apple juice, I can face the small plate that Walter prepares for me. One of Alex’s moist pears, sliced alongside of thin cuts of the sheep cheese and now those precious walnuts are crushed, the meat glistening and as fragrant as an evening fog-laden autumn walk. Like the squirrels on the hill, I have come home with gifts of the forest.

Away from home, wars join natural disasters to fill our newspapers and TV screens. The war in Ukraine remains in the news as much for the war as for the political ramifications, and manoeuvres that are played out on the world stage. Zelensky still strides about in Army fatigues but now they are pressed and clean for he is as often at conferences as he is on the ground with his troops as they enter their third winter in the fields of battle. This is getting messy and does not look to end any time soon. The stakes are too high for both sides.

Nature skips her stones across the deserts and into the lake scolding us for our unwanted cheap behaviour. Storm Daniel flooded and crushed the dams around the city of Derna and swept villages away in Libya, while earthquakes shook villages free from the hillsides of Morocco and Afghanistan.

Coming home from the market, and thinking about what to write for this weekend letter – focusing on the Labour and Conservative Party Conferences that take place in September and October – but while I was plucking carrots, choosing cheese and walnuts – another war exploded. Israel was attacked from The Gaza Strip by Hamas in the biggest attack for fifty years. Among the targets was a music festival held close to the border between the two territories. Israel’s Zika rescue service have so far removed 260 bodies. Images of the festival audience running for their cars also showed the Israeli hostages taken. Many are young, beautiful in their youth, as well as children and grandparents. This was a family day out. There is no pause now, with the Israeli Prime Minister saying the country is embarking on a “long and difficult war”. Hamas claims to have struck Israeli cities while Israel clamps a siege on Gaza. Iran’s officials say “not me gov” and the politicians here are sobered, clambering to position themselves to the right or the left of their own moral consciousness.

The politicians have returned to work beginning with the Conservative and Labour Party conferences. The Conservative party held theirs at the end of September in Manchester, rudely giving the High-speed rail 2 – leading from London to Manchester – the chop. Despite the fact that this was probably not planned out well by their conservative cronies all those years ago – let’s change things for change’s sake – such as the rail tracks width so that no trains running on it could actually link up with other trains across the country or – hold it – going on into Europe. And taking additional slices of the country pie by cutting back on solar panels incentives for farmers. There are a lot of big Conservative farmers who don’t like this new form of harvest, seeing solar panels in their fields as a blight on ‘this green and pleasant land’ preferring their huge combines to scoop out the earth’s resources rather than receive the sun’s bounty.

Now in October, it is the turn of the Labour Party – and even though this brand new war has caused a moment of reflection – the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is doing his thing and so is the Shadow Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, she of flaming red hair and a true Council-house background. Now she is ready to roll and she does. Can she and Sir Keir deliver on housing, the cost of living, the NHS backlog, interest rates, immigration and God knows whatever else. There are some serious messes to clean up. They are an unlikely team but that in itself may help to make them work in harness. During these months and years ‘in opposition’ they have learnt ‘when to hold ‘em and when to fold them’ with each other’s style. If they can both keep focused on the country and not themselves, then there is a chance for The United Kingdom to righten the ship of state.

A little Glitter for Sir Keir at the Labour Party Conference

An interesting development is the addition to the Labour team of Marina Wheeler KC – ex-wife of ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson as Labour’s new “whistleblowing tsar”, offering advice on proposed protections for women against workplace harassment, helping the party strengthen the employment rights of women. After the mandatory six-month break between roles, Sue Grey the former Civil Servant, whose report on the parties at Downing Street during the Covid lock-down helped bring the aforementioned Boris and his boys to the dudgeon – is now Labour’s Chief of Staff. Sir Keir Starmer has more than welcomed these women – formally from the Conservative party – to join him, he has plucked the cream of the crop.

Volunteering at our Community Library has its perks beyond meeting and greeting people from our community. There are books to be borrowed and relished and – tempted by politics – and the writers I do. However the inner truth of ‘Johnson at 10’, by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell – documenting the chaos and downfall of the Johnson premiership – is too unbearable to read. But I dive into the muddled waters of ‘Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within’ by Rory Stewart with the heartbreaking truths of its pages showing me a Conservative party system rotten to the core and it makes me deeply afraid as I face my naiveté.

This has been a Letter from A. Broad written and read for you by Muriel Murch.

Better to Give

October 16, 2020February 12, 2021 / aggiemurch / 6 Comments

Recorded and Knit together by WSM

It is crisp cold on Saturday morning for our hill climb to the Farmers Market. Mushrooms are laid out in small cardboard boxes at one stall while the last of the tomatoes at another. Large Mozzarella balls are two for a tenner. The Italians know that the season of Tomato, Mozzarella and Basil salads is ending. Rutabagas and Swedes are piled in crates looming over bags of potatoes. Winter is coming.

On Sunday we walked through the Italian gardens which every autumn, holds the outdoor Frieze Sculpture exhibit. This year there are more people than ever crowding the sculptures, reflecting a collective hunger for art. In this time of Covid restrictions people remain wary of indoor galleries and museums. Every year, I find one piece that speaks to me. This year, it is Kalliopi Lemos’s ‘The Plait’ A very tall braid of wire signifying a chopped-off braid of hair.

The Plait by Kalliopi Lemos Photo by WSM

And I am remembering my friend Heather and a sunny morning after a sleep-over. Her family had left Kenya abruptly and my mother had found them a place to live by Hawley Lake. There was no electricity and water was carried from the lake. My mother got Heather enrolled in St. Nicholas School and must have ferried us both back and forth to school. There were sleep-overs by kerosene lanterns and adventures by the little stream that ran past their cottage from the lake. But at our home we woke up one morning wanting to play barber. My thick hair was down to my waist but the plaits were kept knotted at night. Mornings were spent in tears with the rushed, brushing, pulling and replaiting that happened.

“I’ll be the barber” said Heather and I happily knelt in front of her.

Somehow she found scissors, maybe old paper scissors from my father’s study, as, when my plaits finally fell away, there was a clear unevenness in the line. Knowing that whatever trouble we got into I would not be spending morning in tears left me elated. All this passed through my mind as I stood looking at the giant wire braid in the park. Lemos explains “an act of disobedience and emancipation of thinking … a liberation’.

Looking at all the different people walking through the park broad-walk I am thinking of war and all the countries they came from. Now journalists have been expelled from Belarus and it is hard to image what is going on behind those iron doors.

Earlier this year, when the demonstrations began in Hong Kong at the Chinese government’s take-over laws, Dominic Raab, then Foreign Secretary for the UK government, announced: “We will take in three million residents from Hong Kong who want to come.” There must have been hurried discussions behind closed doors for there is no ‘Welcome to Britain’ flag waving at the airports.

But Nathan Law, a 27 year old activist, made it. When agreeing to give an interview to Samuel Fishwick from the Evening Standard, he chose a bench in Regent’s Park which looked to be along the broad-walk where we were walking. Law was imprisoned, assaulted, forced to leave his home and family and lives low in London. Though he fears for his life, he knows someone has to speak out.

“The Hong Kong we knew has gone”.
“Will your family know how you are?”
“If you write about me they will find it.” But unspoken is the knowledge that so will others. Can Britain give this young man the safe haven he needs?

Autumn is a time of overflowing bounty. A neighbor on our street brings the harvest of her Oxford garden to London. Boxes of Bramley cooking apples, Cox’s Pippins for eating, and those pesky green tomatoes that refuse to ripen are on her doorstep for anyone to take. I gather them as from orchard grass and now can bake to pass along to other neighbors.

We continue to do what we can for each other as this next round of COVID-19 circles us. Daily 12,500 new cases are reported and tonight brought another set of government rules to learn and abide by.

I imagine our Queen as she follows the news and watches her people doing what they can for their country. Maybe she keeps a note-pad on which to jot down names and pass them on to her Prime Minister of the day for The Birthday Honours list usually in June, when the Queen celebrates her official birthday. This year it was delayed so that COVID-19 front-line workers and volunteers could be honored. She may leave much of the choices to her Prime Minister but with this one she could have more to say.

Orders of the British Empire seem old-fashioned considering that there is no empire but these special recognitions by the Queen mean a lot to everyone. Sir David Attenborough gets a boost upstairs with a hurried make-over of the badge for the Knight Grand Cross. The young footballer Marcus Rashford becomes an MBE. With quiet dignity and persistence, he got the government to do a U-turn, successfully campaigning to extend free school meals over the summer.

“It is never the child’s fault that they are hungry.” This is a young man to watch.

I have a smiling satisfaction at actor David Suchet, most known as Poirot in the re-running Agatha Christie series, becoming a Sir. Dabirul Islam Choudhury, who turns 101 in January, takes home an OBE for walking almost 1,000 laps of his garden, raising money for charity, while fasting for Ramadan. Between him and the better-known Captain Tom, centenarians are showing they remain full of the Right Stuff.

This has been A Letter From A. Board.
written and read for you by Muriel Murch